I still have problems with Kid A.

I know, I know. It’s been 19 years, and I should probably move on and stop trying to enjoy a record I am clearly not going to get. But it’s considered such a masterpiece by, well, everybody that I keep picking at it, hoping that I can free whatever I have been missing so I can drink it in. And yet it eludes me. I quite like “Everything in Its Right Place” and “How to Disappear Completely,” and the tricky time signatures of “Morning Bell” work for me, but most of this record just kind of happens while I am listening to it, without moving me in the slightest.

It’s been the same for nearly two decades, and while I have come to grips with the band Radiohead is now – I rather enjoyed both The King of Limbs and the more traditional and organic A Moon Shaped Pool – I still struggle with the first big step they took down this path. After the complex brilliance of OK Computer, Kid A sounded (and still sounds) like formless atmospheres, disregarding melody for sound.

The thing is, I like music that disregards melody for sound, and I enjoy formless atmosphere. For me, it’s never been that the music on Kid A is too weird. It’s always been the hard right turn that Radiohead took in making it, because I truly love their previous material. The disappointment I felt listening to Kid A in 2000 has been a stumbling block for me since – I still cannot help feeling underwhelmed by it to this day.

That disappointment lingered for a good long time, and I think Thom Yorke took the brunt of it. His solo material has felt the most Kid A-ish to me, with its immersion in synthesizer sounds and its near-total lack of any memorable melody. So no one is more surprised than me at how much I have been able to roll with Anima, Yorke’s decidedly strange third solo album.

I’m surprised because Anima is everything I dislike about Radiohead’s post-OK Computer work. It is almost entirely synthesizer-based, it regularly evaporates into formlessness, and I can’t remember a single one of these songs outside of the variations in mood and feel. I’d have a hard time calling most of these songs at all, so loose are their structures. “Traffic” has a refrain, sort of, but this mainly feels like a collection of experiments that found their way onto Yorke’s hard drive late at night.

But damn if it doesn’t work. For decades now Yorke and his comrades have been trying to capture the sounds of hopelessness and decay, with intermittent success. Anima feels like he got there. The whole album feels constricted, paranoid, haunted, and while Yorke’s solo material has certainly flirted with these emotions before, this one feels like a full immersion. Listening to it feels like falling down a bottomless hole, with no visible way out.

It’s hard for me to pick out particular songs to discuss here, since it’s all of a piece. I like the shift halfway through the tick-ticking “Twist,” when the piano chords that make up the rest of the song come in. I like the backing vocals on the comparatively slinky “I Am a Very Rude Person.” I like how long it takes “The Axe” to actually do anything, and that when it does do something, it includes big drums by Joey Waronker. I love the guitars and strings that open the closer, “Runwayaway.”

But mostly, I like how it all hangs together and leaves me with a dark and empty feeling. Some might find this to be an undesirable effect, but I am all in for music that makes me feel anything. Yorke has been trying to leave me with exactly this sensation for years now, I think, and with Anima, he did it. This isn’t materially different from a lot of the work he’s given us over the past two decades, but for some reason this one has clicked with me, and I can’t stop listening to it.

There has always been a self-consciousness to Yorke’s weirdness, though, whereas I have always found the Flaming Lips to be just naturally weird. The fact that these guys have any hits at all, and that they have spent the majority of their career on a major label, is bizarre. That they convinced that major label to distribute records like Zaireeka and Embryonic is some kind of sorcery.

Warner Bros. is also behind the Lips’ new one – their 15th – called King’s Mouth: Music and Songs. And I don’t expect to hear a weirder major label release this year. Just the background on this thing should tell you what you’re in for: it serves as an accompanying score for an art exhibit (also called King’s Mouth) by frontman Wayne Coyne, and it tells the story of a village and its king, a giant, who sacrifices himself to save the villagers from an avalanche. As tribute, the villagers cut off the king’s head, dip it in steel and put it on display.

Oh, did I mention that there is linking narration by Mick Jones of the Clash? Because there is.

Given all that, this is one of the most accessible records the band has made in years. Songs like “Giant Baby” and “How Many Times” recall the strummy emotionalism of The Soft Bulletin, still among this band’s most beloved records. Many of the Lips’ trademark sounds are here – big low-end synthesizers, acoustic guitars that peek out from behind the din, Coyne’s high, pleading voice – but rather than feel too familiar, they help guide you through this delightfully odd little story.

The king’s death in “All For the Life of the City” works because the band refuses to sentimentalize it – the song is a jaunty trot, only Jones’ narration truly striking at the heart of things. The rest of the album is about the villagers’ attempts to memorialize their giant monarch, and Coyne ties it all together with the closing song, “How Can a Head,” about the multitudes living inside all of us that cannot be captured by a monument, no matter how beautiful. It’s an anthem that can stand alongside their best.

King’s Mouth is, make no mistake, a strange album. But if you’re familiar with the Flaming Lips, nothing here will throw you. In fact, this one may hit home more than some of their recent dives into esoterica – it is certainly closer to classic Lips than, say, Peace Sword. Even at their most crowd-pleasing, though, the Lips have an aesthetic all their own, and it’s in full flower here. I don’t know another band like them, but as long as we have this one, I don’t need to.

As Mick Jones says in the final seconds, that’s the end of our story. Bye! Next week, the Bird and the Bee cover Van Halen and I am here for it. (And probably one or two other things as well.) Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

So I missed all of June.

I’m not complaining about it. It was the best thing for me, and I’m feeling better and more energized about my writing projects since taking an extended break. But the downside is that I missed the chance to talk about a ton of new music that hit shelves during that month. And it’s not like the flood of new releases has abated – I’ve had plenty to discuss since my return, and will be taking a listen to the new Thom Yorke and Flaming Lips records next week.

But I decided to take this week’s column and spend a few minutes with some of the best records that came out during my hiatus. These quick takes aren’t really going to be in any order – these are just some of the albums that I listened to during my weeks off, and have been listening to since. I have honestly not even taken the time to think about where any of these would rank among the year’s best, though one or two of them might end up in the list. These are all recommended to some degree, though, especially if you are a fan of any of the artists’ previous work.

OK, here we go.

Esperanza Spalding, 12 Little Spells.

I’ve heard this thing probably a dozen times and I still don’t know quite what to make of it. I love Esperanza Spalding – I rated her Emily’s D+Evolution the best album of 2016, and saw her live last year just before she released Exposure, her strange sixth album. The music she played on stage, some of which ended up on Spells, was totally out of this world. She uses jazz only as the foundation, the baseline, building off of jazz instrumentation to spin something wholly hers.

12 Little Spells is wholly hers. I honestly don’t know any other musician who could make this record, let alone would make this record. None of this is immediately accessible, the way “Unconditional Love” or “Rest in Pleasure” was. Every song here requires concentration just to follow Spalding’s wild melodies from place to place. Every song is meticulously arranged and complex, showing off just how wide and deep Spalding’s mind is. I love this record, but I don’t feel like I understand it yet.

And that’s OK. Sometimes brilliant music takes time to absorb, and this is absolutely brilliant stuff. Spalding’s bass playing is on point, her voice is vibrant and fully within her control, and her band follows her down each of these rabbit holes with exuberance. Each song is paired with a body part in the liner notes, and Spalding gives you something to ponder with each one, showing just how much thought went into this.

If you want to, you can hear most of this right now – the 12 main “spells” were released online one by one last year, and the four bonus tracks joined them after the album came out in June. I don’t know if there’s a more talented musician working right now, and I hope a few more spins of this record will help me appreciate the wonder I can already tell is there.

Collective Soul, Blood.

Hands up if you thought Collective Soul would still be going in 2019. My hand is down, for the record – I thought they would be a one-hit wonder and fade away quickly. Well, Ed Roland and his merry band showed me. Blood is their tenth album, not counting two live records and an acoustic project, and they show no signs of turning into the ‘90s nostalgia cliché I expected them to.

Far from fading, Blood sounds alive. There’s nothing here the band hasn’t done before – it’s another set of riff-rock with simple melodies – but this is a band that knows what they do, and here they deliver. “Now’s the Time” and “Over Me” bring a strong, crunchy vibe, and closer “Porch Swing” is convincingly folksy. In between these poles Collective Soul just kinda do Collective Soul, and if you like that sort of thing, you will like this.

The Alarm, Sigma.

What, like I’m gonna fail to recommend the Alarm? Never. Sigma is the second official album to come out of the Blood Red Viral Black sessions, and I think it’s the stronger of the two. About half of it is unreleased material (Mike Peters issued two previous collections of recordings from those sessions on the Alarm website), and it’s very good stuff. And the songs drawn from BRVB are excellent, especially “Brighter Than the Sun” and “Love and Understanding.”

Mostly, though, I continue to be surprised and elated at the level of energy Peters and his band still have. This is the new model Alarm – Peters is the only original member, and the band now includes Peters’ wife Jules and his longtime friend James Stevenson of the Cult. But rather than sounding like some in-name-only shadow of itself, this Alarm feels fresh, new, on fire. Peters’ songs are as rousing and raucous as ever, and he keeps trying to write the definitive anthem for our times. He gets close on Sigma, and it doesn’t sound like he’ll ever stop trying.

Baroness, Gold and Grey.

This is quite a thing. Baroness’ second double album will apparently be their final “color series” release, and if you listen to each of these, from Red Album to this one, the progression is simply breathtaking. Gold and Grey is more of a hard rock record than the pummeling metal they started off with, but the songwriting is no less exciting and interesting.

In fact, this might be the band’s most cohesive piece of work, which is remarkable since it is the first without longtime guitarist Pete Adams. Gina Gleason does a fine job as the band heads into more atmospheric territory, and the six instrumental tracks serve to unify the whole thing. I get that some people miss the more aggressive sound the band delivered in its earliest days, but the evolution has been a joy to watch, and Gold and Grey feels like an arrival point. Perfect time to end the series they’re best known for and move on to new creative pastures.

Buddy and Julie Miller, Breakdown on 20th Ave. South.

Husband and wife team Buddy and Julie Miller are legends in their home town of Nashville. Buddy has played with damn near everybody and produced most of them too, and as a songwriter he’s penned work for some of the brightest lights in the Americana scene. Julie is a highly respected singer-songwriter with six acclaimed solo albums to her credit. I love them both individually, but it’s a rare treat when they decide to record together.

And it has been a while – ten years since Written in Chalk, which Julie Miller spent struggling with health issues. You’d never know it listening to this record. It’s another dozen beautiful country-folk songs, all written or co-written by Julie, that find their voices entwining as well as they ever have. Some of these, like “Everything is Your Fault,” feel achingly personal, but all of them feel universal. It’s so nice to have these two back, and I hope we hear more from them in this vein soon.

The Divine Comedy, Office Politics.

I will admit to being a relative newbie to Neil Hannon’s work. I’d heard of his one-man project The Divine Comedy for years, but only recently started dipping into the catalog. So I don’t necessarily have the fullest context in which to place Office Politics, Hannon’s 12th record. But I do know what I like, and I enjoyed nearly every minute of this long, snarky, hilarious collection of songs.

Some of it is just straightforwardly funny, like the privilege anthem “Queuejumper” and the delightful “Norman and Norma.” Some of it is more obscure, like “Philip and Steve’s Furniture Removal Company,” which imagines an endlessly repetitive jingle in the style of Glass and Roach. All of Office Politics, though, feels like it comes from the same dry humor and melodic wellspring, and I am down for all of it. I’m still making my way through Hannon’s prodigious output, but this album is proof that whatever spark he has carried with him still burns brightly.

Titus Andronicus, An Obelisk.

I didn’t even bother to review A Productive Cough, Titus’ ponderous snooze of a fifth album. I barely got through it, and concluded that if the best thing on your record is a nine-minute cover of “Like a Rolling Stone,” something has gone terribly wrong. Well, it seems like the band agreed with me, because An Obelisk, recorded and released quickly, is something of a corrective.

Mastermind Patrick Stickles went and hired Bob Mould to produce and turned out a short, abrasive punk album. No experiments, no detours, no conceptual underpinning, just 38 minutes of focused, rapid-fire, guitar-fueled energy. As a Titus album, it’s not bad – the sameness of it does wear after a while, but it’s short enough to work, and Stickles and the band sound fully invested. As a course correction, this feels like exactly what Titus needed to do. It puts them back at zero, and I can’t wait to hear the next one, which will undoubtedly fire up the ambition machine once again.

Prince, Originals.

And I can’t fail, here at the end, to mention this one. The second posthumous Prince album is a collection of the man’s versions of songs he wrote for others, and it’s revelatory. You expect some of the hits he wrote for Sheila E. and other proteges, and you get them, but I’m most glad to have Prince’s versions of “Jungle Love” and “Manic Monday,” along with “You’re My Love,” a Kenny Rogers song I had no idea he’d written.

But come on, the real gem here is right at the end. Here, finally, is Prince’s original take on “Nothing Compares 2 U,” a song that Sinead O’Connor stripped down and made her own. Prince’s take is bigger and bolder and full of saxophones, and it’s completely different from O’Connor’s, as of course it should be. I can’t say one is better than the other, but thankfully we now have both. The real lesson of this release is just how many well-known songs Prince has written behind the scenes. He truly was one of a kind.

All right, done. That doesn’t fully catch me up, but at least it puts me on record (heh) about eight of the most significant June releases. Next week, as I mentioned, Thom Yorke and the Flaming Lips try to weird us out. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

The name of the new Black Keys album is ‘Let’s Rock’, ironic quotes and all. And I don’t think they could have summed up their aesthetic any better.

It would be tough to call the music made by Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney anything but rock, really. At their best, they traffic in guitar-heavy, blues-influenced tunes with big, familiar-sounding riffs. If you’ve heard “Lo/Hi,” the first single from ‘Let’s Rock’, you know they can sound exactly like ZZ Top at times. There are all kinds of ways to deconstruct it, but at its heart, the Black Keys play rock.

Only they don’t want to get, you know, all “rock” about it. There’s a distance to even their most straightforward music, a sort of winking acknowledgement that, should you feel like none of this is to be taken seriously, they’re right there with you. They’ll rock for you, simplistic lyrics and roadhouse riffage and all, but they’ll also stand in the wings, smoking cigarettes and chuckling at all the rocking.

The end result is a catalog full of a style of music that I don’t know if the band is fully committed to. I mean, they keep doing it, so they must enjoy it. ‘Let’s Rock’ is one of their best, too, a compact 39-minute collection of easy songs that homage the 1970s at just about every turn, but do so effectively. This is welcome after the turgid slog that was 2014’s Turn Blue. It’s also self-produced, marking the end of their four-album association with Danger Mouse, and that also turns out to be a very good thing.

Fans of real, unironic rock will find a lot to love here, from the smoky blues of “Every Little Thing” to the foot-stomping boogie of “Get Yourself Together.” The lyrics are all stupid, but no more stupid than anything Mountain ever did, for example. You can guess the rhymes as they come up, and there are no deeper sentiments on display. (I mean, “On the run, it ain’t no fun being under the gun…”) Which is very rock and roll, come to think of it – it’s always been primal music, staying on the surface.

And you’ll be too busy enjoying the grooves here to care. That ZZ Top beat strikes more than once here, most effectively on “Go,” one of the most convincing slabs of guitar-pop the Keys have given us. (It’s buried at track nine, but don’t miss it.) I’m a fan of the shadows on “Tell Me Lies” and the McCartney-esque sunlight on “Sit Around and Miss You.” The closing “Fire Walk With Me” isn’t the treasure chest of Twin Peaks references I’d hoped, but it is the twelfth good song in a row, and that’s all you can really ask for.

I still think Auerbach and Carney don’t feel this music down to their bones. There’s an element of pastiche, of commentary, of “rocking” instead of rocking. If that matters to you, the Black Keys might never get you where you need them to. If it matters less to you, I will say that ‘Let’s Rock’ is the best record they’ve made in some time, and if that’s enough for you, you should check it out.

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One thing you have to say about Jack White: if nothing else, he feels the music he makes. Since emerging on the scene with the White Stripes, he’s delivered album after album of messy, bluesy guitar rock, drawing from a deep river of influences stretching back a hundred years. He’s somehow mastered the art of being reverential while also being irreverent. He’s often working hard to sound like his blues-rock heroes, but he never feels enslaved to their sounds. He makes Jack White music, and though it might take many forms, it always sounds like Jack White.

That’s true even when he’s just one part of a larger whole, as he is in the Raconteurs. Emerging in 2006 on the back of killer single “Steady, As She Goes,” the Raconteurs established themselves as one of White’s most interesting going concerns. The band includes pop maestro Brendan Benson and two members of the Greenhornes, Jack Lawrence and Patrick Keeler, and the songs are written democratically, with White and Benson trading off lead vocal duties.

After two records back to back, the Raconteurs took 11 years off, but now they’re back with a pretty swell third album, Help Us Stranger. This one feels a little more off the cuff than their previous efforts (but not nearly as accidental as White’s last solo record, Boarding House Reach), but it still ably shows off how well White and Benson converge. White gives Benson’s melodies a punch, while Benson sweetens White’s rawer edges. The result is a compelling rock album that feels spontaneous but never careens off the rails.

One of the best examples of White and Benson playing to each other’s strengths is the mini-epic “Somedays (I Don’t Feel Like Trying).” Its melody feels like pure Benson, its churning chorus riff underpinning the two lead singers as they repeat their frustration and sadness. But then everything stops, a strum begins, and White cranks up the noise for the rousing singalong coda: “I’m here right now, I’m not dead yet…”

Much of this record feels like encouragement in desperate times, like injecting hope into a world gone crazy. The title track is about how we should all help and care for those we don’t know, which seems like an elementary sentiment until you look around and see how much we need that message now. “What’s Yours is Mine” takes aim at the entire idea of personal property, and closer “Thoughts and Prayers,” which I expected to be sarcastic and bitter, is actually dark and pleading: “There’s got to be a better way to contact God and hear her say there are reasons why it is this way…”

Sure, there are throwaway rockers, like “Don’t Bother Me” and “Sunday Driver,” and there’s even one wicked bluesy breakup number (“Now That You’re Gone,” with Benson singing and White wailing on the guitar). But there are some very well considered pieces here as well. “Shine the Light on Me” might be my favorite thing here – over a piano part played by Dean Fertita (Queens of the Stone Age, the Dead Weather), Benson and White harmonize on a Zeppelin-meets-Abbey-Road melody, singing about finding light in the darkest places. All by itself this song justifies bringing the Raconteurs back from the dead.

Even a casual listen will, I think, illuminate the difference between the Black Keys, who stand on the sidelines, and Jack White, who dives right in. Help Us Stranger is another strong, solid effort from this multifaceted talent, and a welcome return for his collaborations with Benson and the rest of the band. It never “rocks,” but it rocks like crazy, and while I don’t mind the former, I vastly prefer the latter.

Next week, a bunch of records I missed during my month off. Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I love old-fashioned brick-and-mortar record stores.

There is literally nothing I don’t love about them. Browsing for hidden treasures, talking about music with the proprietors and customers, seeing musicians play in-store events, supporting local businesses. All of it is wonderful. We’ve been in this brave new digital world for some time now, but I’m still one of those people who likes to hold the CD or record in his hands and read the liner notes and put new acquisitions on the shelf. Hence, record stores.

I wanted to say all that up front because the albums I have been most excited about lately are not available in those record stores. (At least, not yet.) I have been buying more and more albums online in recent years, paying my money directly to the music makers themselves, and while I feel good about supporting them without any middlemen, I do miss the record store experience every time I do it.

And yet, I also have not found an analogous feeling to the one I get when an album I have pre-ordered shows up in my inbox. The last few Marillion albums have been pre-order affairs, and I have gladly given the band my money a year or more in advance each time. And when the download link is emailed to pledgers like me, long before anyone else gets to hear it, there’s a certain undeniable thrill that comes along with it.

That was certainly the case for Bryan Scary’s wonderful new album Birds. Some background: Bryan Scary is one of our most underrated and undervalued pop maestros. His work is extraordinary, intricate and endlessly inventive, while never being anything less than stuck-in-your-head tuneful. He makes amazing records, manic masterpieces of piano-pounding rock, and his last one, the delightfully goofy Daffy’s Elixir, was mind-blowingly complex in all the best ways. (Will also put in a plug for his band Evil Arrows, which released five pretty excellent EPs.)

So of course when Scary asked me, back in 2015, to pony up for a new album, I did it immediately. I knew nothing about it except the title (Birds) and Scary’s brief description of his plan: a more orchestral and consciously beautiful piece of work. I didn’t need anything else. (I’m basically in for anything Scary wants to do, from now until one of us dies.) What I didn’t know – and what Scary didn’t know either – is that it would take him four years to finish Birds and get it into our hands. The last of those years was marked by near-total silence on Scary’s part, and I nearly forgot all about this record, and that I’d already paid for it.

And then, on June 26, it just… showed up. I think even the neighbors heard my delighted gasp when I read the email, and I may have broken one or two laws of physics to download that thing as quickly as possible. It’s been a couple weeks now and I still can’t get enough of it. Birds is stunning, pitched somewhere between pastoral folk and prog rock with some Supertramp thrown in and a healthy helping of orchestral grandeur. It’s absolutely a Bryan Scary album, but it’s like his Apple Venus Vol. 1, bringing his signature intricate melodicism down new avenues of sound.

This is an album on which every song is a highlight, so singling out individual tracks for praise is difficult. I have no doubt, given the depth and complexity of the production, that he worked on this for the entire four years. I can imagine spending months on “Wendy, Wake the Sparrow” alone, with its fluttering string lines, its leaps from strummy folk to monolithic soundtrack music and its abrupt shifts in sound. It’s followed here by a minute-long instrumental that sounds like Frank Zappa writing for an old west saloon band, and I bet even that took ages to get right.

As you might have guessed from the title, these songs are about birds, at least in a metaphorical sense. The album is bookended by a sprightly thing called “I Saw Birds Flocking,” and the songs have titles like “Seagull,” “Birdy” and “Universal Crane.” “Seagull” is one of my favorites, its tone pure Brian Wilson, its melody indelible. The folksy “Royal Soil” is instantly memorable, its shimmering acoustic guitars constantly moving. I particularly love the stompy midsection that turns it into a jig.

But if you forced me, gun to my head, to pick a favorite here, it would probably be “Loon on the Lake.” It’s the most manic thing here, starting with an insistent beat and the title phrase repeated like a mantra, but then it shifts every few seconds, from raw orchestral craziness to a building piano crescendo to more Brian Wilson-esque prettiness. It finally brings everything home in a dazzling instrumental explosion. I’m gonna study this track over and over to figure out how he did it, and I probably never will.

Birds is incredible, a concentrated burst of melodic pop genius that proves once again that Bryan Scary is playing on a whole different level than most other musicians. I have no doubt that it took all four years to make this thing, and I can’t say it feels like he wasted a day. I honestly don’t know when or how you all will get to hear this – Scary is still working out a wide release – but you should jump at the chance. In the meantime, try out Scary’s previous work. It’s all amazing stuff, and if he asks me to pledge again for another record, I won’t even hesitate.

* * * * *

I didn’t wait nearly as long for the new Appleseed Cast album – just the standard pre-order period – but like Scary’s record, I haven’t been able to stop listening to it since it arrived. The Appleseed Cast is a post-rock-y band from Kansas, of all places, and has been plying its trade since 1996. I like everything they’ve done, but I have a particular affinity for 2001’s double album Low Level Owl, which fully broke them out of their emo roots and into a more sonically fascinating area.

Since then, the band has been walking that line, never quite delving into the ambient beauty of Low Level Owl again, but forging ahead with an aggressive yet dreamy sound. Their ninth album, and their first in six years, sports the gloriously self-serious title The Fleeting Light of Impermanence, but the vast, sweeping music within earns it. Half of these eight songs reach or exceed six minutes, and an epic like “Time the Destroyer” earns every second. That song thunders along on a pulsing synthesizer line and swooping strings, with chiming, crashing guitars breaking like waves all over it.

There isn’t a bad song here, and the whole thing flows, one song into another, like a suite. It’s an intense piece of work, one that demands concentration, but it’s a marvelously rewarding one. My favorite thing here comes late – “Reaching the Forest” is a snowy landscape of synthesizers that explodes at the two minute mark into a Cure-like web of guitars circling galloping drums. It’s just amazing from there, sporting one of the record’s best melodies.

But that’s just one bright spot of many on an album that sweeps me away each time I hear it. I’ve enjoyed the last few Appleseed Cast albums, but this one seems to take a step up somehow. It’s a confident and fully formed thing. There’s been some speculation, given the title of the album and the last song (“Last Words and Final Celebrations”), that this may be the last Appleseed Cast album. I hope this is not the case, but if they choose to go out on this one, I wouldn’t blame them. It’s their best in some time, and record store or no, I’m glad to own it.

Next week, some rock and roll, maybe? Follow Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. on Facebook at www.facebook.com/tm3am.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Well. Hello. It’s been a while.

I honestly did not intend to take all of June off from this column. I’ve been writing Tuesday Morning 3 A.M. regularly for almost 19 years, and sometimes I have felt like the momentum of those years is all that has kept carrying it forward. I still enjoy it when I’m doing it, but the desire to sit down and actually do it has waned, if I am being honest. (Also, I’m not sure anyone is reading it, which doesn’t help.)

Still, I’d like to finish out 20 years if I can, and then see how I feel. So I had planned to take my somewhat traditional week off to celebrate my 45th birthday and then jump right back into it. I had ideas for the next three columns, and with the extra week I was looking forward to exploring more complicated records like Esperanza Spalding’s 12 Little Spells. (Spoiler: It’s really good, but it takes several listens to penetrate.)

And then my beloved cat died.

I will probably not be able to explain this properly to people who don’t own and love pets. I have always had cats – my childhood cat was named Pebbles (because her mother’s name was Marblehead, you see, ha ha) and she was a sweet little creature, especially as she grew older. Ever since then, I’ve been a committed cat person, and the bond that grows between a cat and her human is just indescribable to anyone who hasn’t been through it.

And Shadow was a special cat. She came into my life entirely by accident. I had lost my previous cat, the fiercely loyal Miss Kitty, about a year prior and was still not sure if I wanted another. But then a co-worker’s mother died, and that co-worker begged for help finding a new home for her mom’s cat. And I took a chance. She was named Noirah when I got her, but that felt too exotic for this lovable little black furball. It was my nephew Luke who re-named her: she was a black cat who followed me everywhere, so Shadow seemed to fit.

I had her for four years, and we became good friends. I know that sounds weird to people who don’t have pets, but it’s true. She was a snuggly, affectionate cat, and I couldn’t have asked for a better four-legged companion. But she was old when I took her in, and I knew even then it wouldn’t last long. She had bladder problems for the entire time I knew her, and was on medication and special food. Finally, a week or so before my birthday, she developed a tumor in her bladder that prevented her from using the litter box. (Well, that’s not true. She would go to the litter box and sit there for whole minutes while nothing happened, and leave frustrated. It was the saddest thing.)

Finally she stopped eating and drinking, knowing in that way that cats know that things were not going to get better. My vet told me there was nothing we could do. We put her on pain meds and made her as comfortable as we could. And on June 10, with me petting her and telling her it was OK, she died. It was awful. I am singularly incapable of describing in words how awful it was.

And afterward I kind of stopped everything for a bit. Some of you may know that I have this ongoing daily Star Trek project I do. I stopped that as well. I told myself that these things are mine, and I can stop them if I want to for as long as I want to. So I did. Like I said, I honestly did not expect this mourning period-slash-hiatus to last all month, but it has. Oddly, it took traveling to another country to put my spirits right – I’m writing this in Lausanne, Switzerland, in a hotel that overlooks Lake Geneva. I’m here for work, but just being in this place has felt like healing.

So this is the first tm3am column in a month, the longest break I have ever taken. And I don’t know what the future of this little project is, but I felt inspired to write this re-introductory piece and, hopefully, get back on the weekly horse. I’ve been listening to plenty of great new music – I’m especially excited by the new Bryan Scary, which is finally, finally out, but there’s Buddy and Julie Miller and the Appleseed Cast and the Raconteurs and Baroness and the Divine Comedy, and there’s a new Keane coming. I have plenty to write about. I just need the will to write it.

So I will leave this as a statement of purpose, and I’ll be back to this very soon. Thanks to everyone who sent messages of support. And thanks to Shadow for the last four years. It was an honor being your human.

We will return to your regularly scheduled silly music column shortly. Thank you.

See you in line Tuesday morning.